Opening Day

I am going to digress from writing about geocaching for a moment to celebrate the opening of the baseball season today. Although the NFL has become king of sports in the United States, I’ll take baseball any day of the week, including Sundays in the fall.

I was listening to the Detroit Tigers play the Cleveland baseball team. When I came upstairs to write, the Tigers were up 3-0. Yes!

In addition to today being the first day of the baseball season, it is also the first day of #30DaysOfBiking, in which people pledge to ride their bicycles each of the 30 days of April. I’ve been looking forward to it all winter. As the snow and ice of February melted in March and temperatures warmed up, some days even hitting 70 degrees, I knew warm weather would rule throughout the 30 Days of Biking.

Well, Day 1 was anything but warm. The wind was howling out of the north, and snow was falling as I began my ride this morning. Here’s where geocaching comes in. I rode my bike across town to attempt an FTF. Since my FTF streak died in November, I have just one FTF. In January, I got an FTF on GC8FRY2 Flag on the Play, a puzzle cache that was hidden in November 2019. So far, I have the only find on that cache.

This morning I saw there was a new cache published in a cemetery here in town, and my first inclination was to hop in the car and drive over there, drive home after finding the cache, then go out on my bike. I was reminded it’s the beginning of 30 Days of Biking, so I did what any person would do, I got out my bike, checked the tires and went on my way. Nearly 4 miles later, I was at GZ with cache in hand. And a blank log.

After signing the log, I went to look for two other caches in the cemetery. One was in a pine tree, and I have not had much luck of late with pine tree caches. I found it quickly.

After that find I went to a third cache. This one I did not find. I’ll have to go back. Maybe when it warms up a bit or the wind dies down.

For the ride home I found myself fighting the wind most the way home. The closer I got to home, the more worn out I felt. I wanted to stop and take a nap. When I got home I had a couple PB&J sandwiches, some hot tea and found the ballgame on the internet.